AMD asks what you want from RDNA 4. PC gamers reply: 'er, just make sure we can actually buy it, oh and don't worry about ray tracing'
New GPUs selling out in picoseconds has depressingly become the norm. That includes, inevitably, Nvidia's latest RTX 50-series graphics cards. Maybe that's why when AMD yesterday asked gamers to say what they were most «excited» about for the upcoming RDNA 4 GPUs, «availability would be a brilliant start,» pretty much sums up the sentiment.
Of course, that wasn't the only response to AMD's consumer and gaming rep, Frank Azor, when he posted, "What features are you most excited about in RDNA4?" on X. But the word «availability» does pop up rather a lot.
What features are you most excited about in RDNA4?February 6, 2025
Pricing is another major theme AMD will need to address when the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT arrive in early March. «Don’t want to pay more for my GPU than I paid for my entire high end gaming rig a year ago,» was the response from one X user and you get exactly where they're coming from.
Next, upscaling generally and more specifically and as one poster put it, «FSR 4 is a big one.» FSR 4 will move AMD into the AI upscaling era, matching the approach Nvidia has been using ever since DLSS was first announced way back in 2018.
The slight snag is that just as AMD finally catches up in that broad regard, Nvidia has just made the jump from a CNN to transformer model for its upscaling, in some ways dramatically improving quality. Oh, and it has added Multi Frame Generation to DLSS, too. As ever, then, it feels like AMD is constantly playing catch up, always taking on Nvidia with a feature set that's a few years behind.
On the other hand, AMD can take solace from some of the response on X, many of whom said they just wanted solid raster performance at a great price. «All I want is much better 'real' frames per $,» is a comment that probably sums up that line of posting.
Beyond that, one notable absence, relatively speaking, was mention of ray-tracing performance. It's not that nobody mentions it at all, but RT absolutely doesn't rank nearly as highly as
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